Even More Elven Shenanigans

I'm not sure exactly how many sessions of the Friday game this spans; I think four?

The party's plan to dive-bomb and blitz the hole in the side of the dark elven HQ was ruined by the dark elf perimeter being set up outside the building for some reason -- they didn't have cover or anything, and didn't really last very long after the party blundered into them, so it was kind of weird that they weren't behind some sort of defensive fortification.

An explanation for that was forthcoming as soon as the party sent Pix inside to scout -- a demon was bound there, held helpless in a magic circle until somebody entered the room, at which point he was free to do whatever he wanted. Which was, of course, 'kill the party'.

It didn't go so well for him.

After passing through a room with an altar dedicated to an evil god, and pausing to desecrate it thoroughly, the party found a beautiful wood-elven woman chained to a leaf in the middle of the next room, in front of a giant otherworldly portal. Kijji wanted to free her, but needed his party's help to do it without someone going swimming in the mysterious pool -- he could fly, but wasn't strong enough to break her chains. The rest of the party was not that stupid, and realized that this was an obvious trap. Eventually, she got flustered and tried to dominate Sin, only to fail because he happened to be standing in Shirish's magic circle against evil.

It turned out that she was an Aboleth, and not the succubus they'd assumed. What a waste of cold-iron arrows! The portal in the room was actually an illusion -- another lure to get people to wade into the pool where the Aboleth could have brought its full power to bear.

A little farther on, they found the real portal, guarded by a single dark elf who cackled about how their victory was meaningless because losing the portal was only a setback or something. They killed him and dove through the portal as it started to close -- because while they weren't sure how 'securing the portal' was going to work, being in the room where it used to open while it was closed didn't seem to qualify.

Through the portal, they found themselves in a shadow realm, 10,000 years in the psst, just before a great cataclysm destroyed the world as the people then knew it. The cataclysm being a giant meteor, which they could see by looking up. Not being astronomers, they had no idea how long it would be until the mirror fell -- hell, since this was a shadow realm it might *never* fall.

Looking at the portal they'd come through, they could see why it had shut down -- someone had removed its keystone, and they'd need to find them in order to get it back. So they ran all over town questioning the elves that 'lived' there, who acted a lot like shadowy ghost people who didn't really know what was going on. Annoyingly, everything useful in the town had already been removed since the meteor was about to smash down and kill everyone. This mostly annoyed Kijji who'd looked forwards to looting and pillaging a town of shadowy ghost people who didn't really 'count'.

The rest of the party was not as confident as he was in the lack of moral worth the denizens of the town had. Also, less confident in their ability to take shadow loot back to the real world. As a compromise, they decided to go kill the dark elves that everybody said were infesting the observatory -- especially since the dark elf boss was supposed to be there with the keystone.

The front door was guarded by locals, so to avoid randomly murdering them they flew and/or climbed a rope up to a balcony and assaulted the top of the tower directly. The boss was a little surprised to see them, and then a lot dead. They then decided to head back down and kill the rest of the dark elves in the building, just for completeness and loot.

There weren't really very many dark elves in the building, compared to the armies they'd fought elsewhere. There were also more demons and drakes than they expected. And more civilians to get caught in the crossfire because Kijji was tossing around bombs and didn't consider them real people. When they got down to the front hallway, they finally fought a reasonable collection of dark elves, and the last one fled into the city.

Kijji: "Chase him!"Kiet: "Why don't you chase him?"Kijji: "I just went, so I can't chase him until next round."GM: "Are you sure you want to chase him out into the city?"Kijji: "Um... why wouldn't we? The ghosts there don't really react to anything we do."GM: "Aren't you worried about running into more dark elves?"Kijji: "No? They were all supposed to be here in the observatory. That's why we're clearing the building -- to eliminate all the enemy forces in this pocket dimension or whatever it is."GM: "...because the module says that if you get into a fight in the city, an infinite number of dark elves can respond."Kijji: "The fuck? We explored the city for an ENTIRE DAY and didn't see or hear any sign of dark elves except for the ones in the observatory. Are they all ninjas or something?"